187. All Things New — A Conversation with Fiona and Terryl Givens

For this week’s episode, we’re sharing a conversation we had originally released almost three years ago — before many of you had started listening to the podcast! It’s the discussion we had with Fiona and Terryl Givens about the ground-shifting book they published in 2020 through Faith Matters Publishing, called All Things New: Rethinking Sin, Salvation, and Everything in Between.

When this book was first published, we knew it had the potential to truly change lives, and change how Latter-day Saints see the world. It certainly did for us. The book starts by tracing the roots of our religious vocabulary and shows how many fundamental gospel concepts and words have become  unmoored from their original foundations and in many cases, can get us stuck in a gospel of fear that places limits on God’s love and grace.

Fiona and Terryl show us how we can renovate that vocabulary to embrace a gospel of hope where there is no final buzzer or sad heaven, because in their words, "Salvation and heaven are not rewards that God can dispense, or that we can earn. Relationships are forged. Life is the school of love, and our growing capacity for love constitutes the bricks out of which the heavenly Zion will be constructed."

In the book, and in our conversation, Terryl and Fiona address everything from our concepts of heaven, sin, salvation, exaltation, and family togetherness in the eternities. We found the work they do in this important book to be immensely healing and hopeful.